Marathon Petroleum is an independent petroleum product refining, marketing, retail and midstream company. Co.'s operating segments include: Refining and Marketing, which refines crude oil and other feedstocks at its refineries, purchases refined products and ethanol for resale and distributes refined products through transportation, storage, distribution and marketing sevices; and Midstream, which transports, stores, distributes and markets crude oil and refined products via refining logistics assets, pipelines, terminals, towboats and barges; gathers, processes and transports natural gas; and gathers, transports, fractionates, stores and markets natural gas liquids.
When researching a stock like Marathon Petroleum, many investors are the most familiar with Fundamental Analysis — looking at a company's balance sheet, earnings, revenues, and what's happening in that company's underlying business. Investors who use Fundamental Analysis to identify good stocks to buy or sell can also benefit from MPC Technical Analysis to help find a good entry or exit point. Technical Analysis is blind to the fundamentals and looks only at the trading data for MPC stock — the real life supply and demand for the stock over time — and examines that data in different ways. One of these ways is called the Relative Strength Index, or RSI. This popular indicator, originally developed in the 1970's by J. Welles Wilder, looks at a 14-day moving average of a stock's gains on its up days, versus its losses on its down days. The resulting MPC RSI is a value that measures momentum, oscillating between "oversold" and "overbought" on a scale of zero to 100. A reading below 30 is viewed to be oversold, which a bullish investor could look to as a sign that the selling is in the process of exhausting itself, and look for entry point opportunities. A reading above 70 is viewed to be overbought, which could indicate that a rally in progress is starting to get crowded with buyers. If the rally has been a long one, that could be a sign that a pullback is overdue. |